Where you live: the best places
They’re such a big target – and everyone who reads them knows how easy it is hit the logical lunacy of columns by Tom Friedman, David Brooks, and Maureen Dowd, among others. But this New York Times interactive feature on the best and worst places to grow up also leaves a bit to be desired.
I don’t think its fact are wrong, per se; indeed they quite accurate, I’m sure. It’s just that there is far more to the story, which assumes that everyone is only living to earn as much as possible. Certainly, many people are. But do we have to cater every possible thought and thought process toward them? What if you are living to become the best person you can? Or to help make your community a vibrant, welcoming place? To use less energy? To achieve some kind of work-life-family balance? There are a whole host of reasons to live any place, and they can’t be completely disentangled.
Also, for counties where there is extremely bad income mobility for children in poor families, the accompanying text boldly suggests that families should move to a better, adjoining county. There are so many reasons that this would be a terrible idea in many cases that it undermines that case for the entire (and exhaustively robust) info graphic in the first place. That’s the take away? To move? What about the other factors that would surely follow? Besides the obvious impossibilities that would come into play for most people – this is akin to advice that, if your job doesn’t pay well enough, just get another, better paying job – the array of other impacts, less diversity, no public transportation, less nightlife and restaurants, driving (if applicable) back from the terrible place you lived where there was more going on after a few drinks to your Shangra-la out in the (gated, even) sticks, more TV watching, fewer neighbors… the whole thing becomes absurd when imagined within these all-too-likely outcomes.
It is great to acknowledge (and visualize) societal problems. But let’s don’t get too secure in the availability of easy answers.
In Less Green News
The New York Times Green Blog is shutting down:
But we will forge ahead with our aggressive reporting on environmental and energy topics, including climate change, land use, threatened ecosystems, government policy, the fossil fuel industries, the growing renewables sector and consumer choices.
By doing less of it.
Maybe they’re starting a new Oscars blog?
The Electric Car Evil
Incoming, via Doug at BJ. So the NYT takes a hit out on Tesla Motor Company, but the Tesla says, “Not so fast:”
Data released by Tesla Motors late Wednesday night directly contradicts a damning review of the automaker’s Model S sedan by The New York Times.
Tesla claims the data, pulled directly from the electric sedan’s on-board computer, proves that New York Times reporter John M. Broder never completely ran out of energy during his extended drive of the Model S, despite his account to the contrary.
Broder’s trip in the Model S began outside of Washington, D.C., ran up to Norwich, Connecticut and then down to Milford, Connecticut over the course of two days. The drive was intended as a way to evaluate Tesla’s newly installed Supercharger stations, which allow Model S owners to top off their batteries for free at solar-powered charging stations lining major thoroughfares along the east and west coasts.
Building batteries is hard; building businesses that purvey renewable transportation options, harder still. I’m not sure who is right in this instance, but conventional wisdom against cars that do not run on legacy energy will be hard to overturn. There’s always an easy story for an editor to assign – show how it doesn’t really work. Not until they appear in a novel where the lads take a cross-country jaunt in an EElectric Buick will the tide even begin to turn. I wonder if horses worked the same media advantages against the Model T.
Whistling Past the Gravy
This is a really good point that is also true for the way we/I might and do talk about using less, walking, biking… whatever your particular flavor of enlightened action/activism might be:
But when Bittman says things like this, it gets under my skin:
What’s easier [than political action] is to cook at every opportunity, to demonstrate to family and neighbors that the real way is the better way. And even the more fun way: kind of like a carnival.
Maybe. But cooking for a big family is hard work. It’s not fun for everyone. Food writers (Michael Pollan does this as well) romanticize a past of family meals. But those meals were not easy to make. They were almost always created by women who stayed at home and toiled away at running a household. Even if that situation were desirable today, and many of us would say it is not, it’s not realistic. Most families cannot survive without two incomes and even working two jobs. That doesn’t even take into account single parents. The history of processed food does not inspire one with delicious joy, but it is also a history of technological relief from drudgery. That’s no less true today.
Good to remember that the effectiveness of some of the solutions you might hear about or suggest yourself are just out of the realm of possibility for some people, if not insulting to them. And highfalutin’ advocacy may even work against you and send people right back into the arms of McDo, Exxon, Big Oil, the Kochs, the Tea Party… whomever it may be that is already telling people what they want to hear. You may quite easily and without intent put forth a holier-than-thou solution that turns more people off than on. It’s not a needle (you must thread), but it is sharp. Remember other people’s vulnerabilities. The life you save may be your own.
In a much too similar vein, NPR is pathetic.
Live from Hopedale
Best op-ed in the Times this week is again by Bob Herbert.
The risks unleashed by the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig are profound — the latest to be set in motion by the scandalous, rapacious greed of the oil industry and its powerful allies and enablers in government. America is selling its soul for oil.
Uh-huh. The double-bite of the green metaphor just gets more twisted and foul.
Back at the Front, part MCMLXXVII
This could go without saying, but because it is within the purview of our chosen subject matter, and because it contributes in small order to the larger, if inelegant, semantic question, I should point out the several entries in the dictionary dedicated to green, which state
| 5. | not fully developed or perfected in growth or condition; unripe; not properly aged: This peach is still green. |
| 6. | unseasoned; not dried or cured: green lumber. |
| 7. | immature in age or judgment; untrained; inexperienced: a green worker. |
| 8. | simple; unsophisticated; gullible; easily fooled |
This will, of course, come as no surprise to most. But much of the very valuable print real estate devoted to the resignation of the governor of Alaska, not least of which is an op-ed in today’s NYT, seems to misunderestimate the most salient aspect of her disqualifications, the one which made her pick as VP the greatest political blunder in a history littered with them. Primarily, she was in no way ready. Though this is tripe, it may be instructive. For not the first time, entries 5-8 above seem to apply to writer and subject. He waxes:
In a recent Pew poll, 44 percent of Americans regarded Palin unfavorably. But slightly more had a favorable impression of her. That number included 46 percent of independents, and 48 percent of Americans without a college education.
That last statistic is a crucial one. Palin’s popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.
What matters a free education if one learns the wrong lessons? More:
Here are lessons of the Sarah Palin experience, for any aspiring politician who shares her background and her sex. Your children will go through the tabloid wringer. Your religion will be mocked and misrepresented. Your political record will be distorted, to better parody your family and your faith. (And no, gentle reader, Palin did not insist on abstinence-only sex education, slash funds for special-needs children or inject creationism into public schools.)
None of that is right, and you condescend to address me as ‘dear reader’ at your peril. Reminds me of someone continually addressing all of us “my friends”. Anyway, these are decidedly not the lessons of the Palin experience, such as it was. She should have never accepted the offer of VP for all of the reasons Douthat gives above but misapprehends with startling precision: she was not ready. Green in the worst way. We seemingly learned this from the 2001-2009 fiasco, but we need to pick the very smartest possible person who is available to be president. [.] That ‘s not different for women or men, black, white, red or yellow, with kids or without, religious or not. It’s an impossible job for the very best among us – and he’s saying it would have been more dispiriting to American democracy if she had somehow managed to make it into office? It’s hairless logic from Plan 9 all over again.
But if you venture out among small-town papers and cable news shows, this is the right-side victimology that greets you: Palin proves a regular person can’t be president. Under attack, all the time, beseiged by elites… what’s happening to this country? I think the question answers itself. Only in a children’s book would Palin be a credible foil to Obama. Her nomination was demeaning to her gender and social class, but only because her ostensible comrades tried to use them as a route to power above the interests of the country. Hey, there’s a story, Mr. conservative op-ed guy.
Okay. Back to your regularly-scheduled Eco meltdown.
The Rapacious Blur
Green means money, dough, skin, ball, quid, of course. The financial meltdown that hit the news last fall and slowly bled over most of the entire planet is recounted in two new books, which are in turn reviewed by MK in the NYT. Fool’s Gold by Gillian Tett and Dumb Money by Daniel Gross both look like decent post-mortems that gnaw on some of my favorite bones like the corruption of business schools and suburban real estate speculation. Looking at them, both also paint gobs of parallel context onto what has become the Eco Hustle that we know so well.
It was also a disaster, he [Gross] notes, with “plenty of blame to go around,” including “poor regulation, eight years of a failed Republican economic philosophy, Wall Street-friendly Democrats who helped stymie reform, misguided bipartisan efforts to promote home ownership, Wall Street greed, corrupt C.E.O.’s, a botched rescue effort” and poor judgment calls on the part of the Fed, and top bankers who in many cases did not even understand the derivatives their firms were trading in.
In short the current global financial crisis is a story about people who thought they were the smartest guys in the room and who turned out to be remarkably naïve, reckless or, in some cases, downright stupid. It’s a story — novelistic in its narrative and moral arc — about hubris and greed and heedlessness, about people, as Fitzgerald wrote in “The Great Gatsby,” who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness” and “let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Sometimes you don’t even have to substitute any words to have the stories turn out so strikingly similar. So maybe we can chalk it up to getting knowing-er about the what when the next when comes. It’s good that competent experts like these can find publishers, and I usually enjoy Kakutani’s slightly-more-than-just-the-facts style.
NYT blogger vs. her commenters
Nothing. The former editor of Dwell magazine waxes positive about transforming the suburbs. It’s the paper of record and the record is clear: now that we have expended grand-scale resources for decades building these monuments to isolation and celebrating them in glossy print mags, we need to devote serious thought to unworkable solutions to save said monuments for the sake of… I’m not sure but it starts to resemble the operative rationale for Iraq in that we don’t want the deaths of soldiers in the war to have been in vain so we must… kill some more.
It’s the beauty of the new media paradigm: Grey Lady with blog posts article full of vague pronouncements to re-cast past placement of deck chairs and, (mostly) without rancor, commenters come to the rescue with helpful suggestions. Practice for fire departments is one favorite.